As the Devils continue their pursuit to make some history on the ice this season, they’ll celebrate a piece of their storied past next month by honoring former coach Jacques Lemaire with a spot in the team’s still relatively new Ring of Honor. At this point Lemaire will only be the third person to be recognized in that way along with original owner John McMullen and three-time Cup champion Sergei Brylin. There could definitely be more names added to this list in the near future, certainly some players who aren’t already up in the rafters with a retired number would be easy or compelling arguments. Perhaps former Cup-winning coaches Pat Burns and Larry Robinson as well. Of course, the big name missing so far is Lou Lamoriello but I think it’s pretty well understood that both he’ll be there, and that he doesn’t want any kind of personal ceremonies until his career is over, only deigning to let the Hockey Hall of Fame honor him before that haha.

Lou’s most important hire in almost forty years as a GM will also be one of the most sentimental recognitions for me and thousands of other Devil fans. After all, Jacques was the coach when I started following the team who first led the team to glory, and he was the main figure besides Lou himself who helped put the infrastructure in place which led to the best decade in Devils history and two more titles after he left the organization in 1998. It’s extremely rare for a HOF-level player to be a great coach too, but Jacques was a rare individual.

In many ways, even the way he ended his playing career was evidence of that, rejecting a long-term contract offer with the Canadiens in 1979 to run a team in Switzerland for three years before coming back to the States to serve as a college hockey assistant before eventually getting to coach Montreal itself, but abruptly his tenure ended after just over a season behind the bench there. I can’t find any info on Wikipedia as to why but I recall reading years ago that Jacques just didn’t care for the unique pressures of coaching in Montreal and remained in their organization in other behind the scenes capacities for several years before Lou came a calling, needing both stability behind the bench (after having like seven coaches in the previous seven years) and a figure who would command respect.

To a large degree, his first year here was the best coaching job he ever did, and it started by putting an All-Star staff together with former playing teammate Robinson as his right hand behind the bench and bringing in Jacques Caron to be the goaltending coach just when we had a hotshot rookie named Martin Brodeur. Clearly there was talent in the organization with Brodeur – who eventually won the starting job after a season of alternating with veteran Chris Terreri – along with second-year pro Scott Niedermayer as well as Scott Stevens in his third season with the Devils, but given the franchise’s lack of playoff success following its initial foray to within one game of the Stanley Cup Finals in 1988, it was Lemaire who provided the structure on the ice, in more ways than one.

After all he ‘invented’ the neutral-zone trap, a system he actually learned from his days with the Canadiens but he certainly refined and in some ways perfected it with the Devils, leading the team to a then-franchise best 106 points in 1993-94 and only losing to the eventual Stanley Cup champion Rangers in a classic seven-game series before rampaging through the league during the 1995 playoffs, only losing four games and going a then-unheard of 10-1 on the road in the postseason en route to the franchise’s first Stanley Cup, and a well-timed one considering the Nashville move rumors. We’ll never know if the Cup really was the difference in the team staying or leaving New Jersey, I felt like it would be at the time and McMullen seemed to confirm it later on citing the fan reception during the team’s championship celebration as one key factor in him staying.

While I do like the official Cup video as well, I’m partial to the SportsChannel doc narrated BY Doc Emrick, for obvious reasons. That proved to be the high point of Lemaire’s initial tenure with the Devils as the team surprisingly missed the postseason next year, then suffered early exits at the hands of the rival Rangers in 1997 and even more shockingly, the playoff neophyte Ottawa Senators in 1998. Perhaps it was somewhat fitting that the end of his tenure here came at the hands of a Lemaire disciple in Jacques Martin, who out-trapped us that series. His departure after the Ottawa series always felt like a bit of a mutual parting of the ways, and to his credit Jacques always seems to know when the time’s right for something else.

His next step was a bit of a surprise – resurfacing as head coach of the expansion Wild – and he remained there nearly a decade. Even with much harder expansion draft rules in the early 2000’s compared to the post-Vegas and Seattle era, Lemaire managed to make the Wild competitive instantly and even got them to the Western Conference Finals in their third-season, upsetting Colorado and Vancouver in the playoffs before running out of gas against fellow upstart Anaheim. He would never have that kind of success in Minnesota again though, despite six straight seasons above NHL .500 and two more playoff appearances, their only playoff series wins under Jacques were in that 2002-03 run.

Eventually his time was up there and he came back ‘home’ to once again coach the Devils for the 2009-10 season. For half a season, things went swimmingly as New Jersey won thirty-one of the first forty-one games and were in President’s Trophy contention before falling off in the second half, and looking flaccid in a five-game loss to the Flyers in the first round of the playoffs. Abruptly, Jacques stepped aside days after saying he was looking forward to the next season. Whatever happened in the spring of 2010 paled to the fall however, when the Devils’ crash accelerated during a putrid first half of the season that saw them follow to rock bottom of the entire league. It was at this point that Lou went back to the well one more time, begging his ‘buddy’ to come back and help repair the Titanic. His first postgame press conference was as much humorous life lessons from grandpa as it was an actual breakdown of where the team needed to improve:

If his first year and a half here was his best, his last half season may not have been too far behind that. The difference was stark, as the Devils finished the first half at 10-29-2 then surged to a 28-10-3 second half in largely a hopeless cause, though they did miraculously cut their deficit out of the playoffs to six points in mid-March after being close to thirty points out by the New Year! Perhaps the first half was worth it just to get Jacques back and have him retire (for good this time) on a much better note than the end of the previous season was.

In some ways it’s almost as sobering to realize that season was thirteen years ago as it was to have the 25th anniversary of the 1995 champions a few years back. I’ve pretty much been to every big ‘event’ home game in franchise history from the number retirements to the original Ring of Honor ceremonies and other nights for players, and this will be no exception. I’d originally traded in my ticket for the Boston game next month (for the dud of a Blues game a couple weeks ago, after I’d originally used a buyback for my seat earlier) because it was a 7:30 start so I try to avoid the late games like the plague, but once this got announced I did another ticket swap and wound up getting my own seat back for that game. Even if a 7:30 start plus a ceremony means this game’s ending after ten on a weekday hah.

I could have waited to do this piece closer to the actual ceremony itself but if the last few weeks and months have taught me anything personally, sometimes you just gotta go with something when you feel like it. This current Devil team certainly deserves more written about it at the moment, even if their last game was also a home dud (at least I wasn’t at that one though, and did attend an actual home win on Friday!). Maybe I’ll do a homestand recap at the end of the five-game block, of which I’ll be at three including tonight’s game against the Leafs. I did have to miss the NJ home opener this year for the first time in a while, hopefully we’ll do a bit better in this game than the last time we played the Leafs here in October!

Like I said earlier though, this is one of the honor the past ceremonies that hits me more than a lot of others, as it will when Lou himself finally deigns to have one! Jacques may not have been a part of the Devils since he retired in 2011 but he’ll always be a major part of the franchise’s decade-long run as a preeminent championship team in the NHL, along with a big part of my early fandom of the team.